Survival Instinct - Preview

Electricity was in the air, and dark storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. They blew menacingly over the city while the Benjamins and Eric tucked into their dessert.

Eric finished eating and walked to the window. His clothes were grey and black. Against the backdrop of the coming storm, he was almost camouflaged. Ursula joined him, and she was dressed almost identically.

Are we still going to do this tonight? thought Ursula.

Of course, thought Eric, the storm will provide even better cover for us.

Behind them, Mémé cleared the dishes from the table and took them into the kitchen for Granddad Benjamin to wash-up. She stood behind him like a parrot perched on his shoulder, telling him what to do while Granddad Benjamin carried on regardless, apparently deaf to the ‘correct way’ of washing-up. However, when Ursula asked if she and Eric could go out onto the roof to watch the storm, he replied immediately, “Yes.”

“But only if you take your raincoats and umbrellas,” added Mémé and went to fetch them. She returned with a black travel umbrella, a large ‘Roland Garros 1982’ tennis umbrella and their waterproof jackets which she made them put on straight away.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she fussed. “I worry when you two are up there.”

“We know,” answered the children together.

“We’ll be fine,” reassured Ursula. “The worst that could happen is that we get wet.”

“And I love storms. I can watch them for hours,” added Eric.

“As long as you’re back down here before bed time, I trust you.”

The last three words stabbed Ursula right in the heart. Her grandparents had brought her up to be honest and on the rare occasions that she wasn’t, it hurt.

Eric slipped out of the living room and sprung up onto the balcony wall. No matter how many times Mémé had seen Ursula and now Eric do it, her heart still skipped a beat. She remembered clearly the first time she had seen Ursula up there.

Ursula had been five years old, and she had opened the door to the balcony. She had shouted to Mémé to leave the kitchen and come and see. Mémé had entered the living room and seen Ursula tight-rope walking on the balcony wall.

“Ursula! No!” she had shouted and had run towards the balcony, her arms outstretched.

Ursula stepped back, lost her footing and disappeared from view. Mémé ran to the wall and looked over the side, but there was no trace of Ursula. Then her smiling face had appeared from the balcony below and Mémé nearly had a heart attack. This was the first time that Mémé had considered that her granddaughter was not quite like other children. The idea had crossed her mind on many other occasions since then, but she tried not to dwell on it.

Ursula joined Eric on the balcony. They threw their umbrellas above them and in one coordinated and fluid movement they leapt up to the roof; gripped it tight and then swung themselves upwards.

Once on the roof, they could see that the storm clouds had covered Paris. Behind them, the Stade de France had switched on its floodlights and lit up the sky.

“You’re not going to wimp out, are you?” asked Eric, sensing Ursula’s doubts. “You can stay and cover for me if you don’t have the balls.”

Ursula shook her head, picked up the travel umbrella and walked off across the rooftop to the far side of the apartment block. Eric picked up the large, tennis umbrella and followed. It soon began to rain, and they both pulled their waterproof hoods over their heads.

On the roof edge was a rusty gutter attached to a drainpipe leading down. Ursula slid over the edge and nimbly climbed down eight floors to the ground below. Once again Eric followed but with a large umbrella in one hand it was not as easy to hold the drainpipe. He considered dropping it but did not want to risk hitting Ursula and ruining their excursion before they had even reached their destination. Halfway down, he heard a crack and saw the drainpipe below him come away from the wall.

He looked down to find an alternative route but there was none, so he slowly continued his descent. As he neared the broken pipe, it started to shake, and another section came away from the wall with a loud snap. He was still too high to jump without injuring himself, but he felt sure he would be fine.

“Come on, slow coach,” shouted Ursula from the ground below, oblivious to the dangerous assault course she had left behind.Her words were followed by the sound of the drain pipe breaking clean away from the wall and throwing Eric into the air.

As if he had planned it, Eric instantly opened up his umbrella, held tightly to the handle and speedily, but relatively safely, fell downwards. A metre above the grass he let go, hit the ground, did a controlled roll, jumped up again and caught the umbrella.“Show off,” muttered Ursula and walked off.

Inside his hot and stuffy TV observation room, Agent Hoover was glued to the screens. He had missed Ursula’s descent but caught the end of Eric’s. Eric’s hood and umbrella had shielded his face, but Agent Hoover’s interest had been piqued.“Geez, would you look at that! That is one lucky kid,” he said to himself and widened his focus again to take in all the screens.

The journey to the Stade de France was uneventful. Both Eric and Ursula kept their hoods and umbrellas up as the rain poured down. In the days leading up to their excursion, they had pinpointed as many CCTV cameras as they could, in order to avoid them. This meant taking a longer route, including crossing a bridge further away, but it was safer.

When they finally arrived at the stadium, Ursula stopped to take it all in. She had always lived near the Stade de France, but she had never been this close to it. There had been times when she would have loved to have attended a sports game or a big concert, but she never had. Residents of les banlieues just didn’t go there, except to sell hotdogs or clear the rubbish away after the event. Until Eric put the idea into her head, she had never considered visiting.

From the rooftop above her grandparents’ flat, the stadium was an impressive construction. It was almost a perfect oval, crisscrossed with huge steel cables and glowed like an enormous halo when lit. Now, however, as she stood looking at the large lumps of concrete blocks and metal girders she wondered what she was doing here.

Eric joined her with the tickets and she followed him into the stadium. As she questioned whether they should turn back and go home, Eric spun around.

“Don’t think like that,” he ordered. “Wait until you get inside and then you won’t want to go home.” He paused and pointed towards the gate leading to their seats, “Listen to that.”

It was only then that Ursula noticed the low roar of thousands of voices. Eric didn’t wait for her response and sped off towards the entrance with Ursula running after him. The moment they walked through the gates and towards their seats Ursula knew she had to stay. She had never been in an arena so large. All around her she could see and hear thousands of people, and she could feel the expectant atmosphere. All eyes were watching the pitch as the two teams entered, walking into the pouring rain under the bright floodlights.

A steward impatiently motioned the children towards their seats. They sat down and placed the drenched umbrellas on the floor in front of them.

National anthems were played; the teams took their places and just before the evening kick-off sixteen television cameras panned over the capacity crowd.

An alarm beeped annoyingly on the computer in front of Agent Hoover. In the thirteen weeks since the machine had been installed on his desk, it had made no sound except the gentle whir of its fans.

Agent Hoover looked down at the screen. In big red letters the words, ‘Suspected match,’ flashed across the screen. Behind it, TV5 Monde was broadcasting a live soccer game from the Stade de France. For a moment, Agent Hoover wondered whether the computer was having a joke with him. These thoughts soon disappeared when the footage rewound and paused on a wide shot of the full stadium. Slowly the people in the crowd got larger as the computer zoomed in, scanning left and right as it did so. When it came to a halt, two faces filled the screen. One face was black and female; the other was white and male – the most wanted children on the planet. Without thinking any further, Agent Hoover hit the alarm button and sat back in his swivel chair taking in the two faces.

They look happy, he thought, free as two birds!

“Enjoy it while you can, kids,” he said to the screen and then, under his breath he quietly sang to himself, “nowhere to run baby, nowhere to hide…”

By the time he had finished the song, every screen in front of him was showing footage from every CCTV camera in a five kilometre radius of the stadium.

Before the referee had blown the final whistle, Agent Angel was also standing in front of the screens. A friendly, yet intimidating, hand rested on Hoover’s shoulder as he watched the two children intently.

“It is likely that we will lose them when they leave the soccer game, Sir,” warned Agent Hoover. “There are eighty thousand people in that stadium.”

“Do your best Hoover, but don’t worry too much. We know where they are now. They’ve made their first mistake. It won’t be their last. All we need to do is smoke’em out. Team Jupiter is on their way to Paris as we speak. It is time for some extreme rendition.”

“You mean kidnapping, Sir?” asked Agent Hoover nervously.

Agent Angel chuckled to himself and answered, “Kidnapping is so old-fashioned. Now we call it rendition. People don’t have such negative connotations with new words, so you can use them more freely and without the same amount of damaging press.”

Agent Hoover did not know how to reply to this so said nothing and watched the screens instead.

Exactly as he had predicted, Eric and Ursula disappeared into the post-match crowd. The loss didn’t dampen Agent Angel’s spirits, and he lit a big, fat, Cuban cigar which he smoked happily as he walked away.